Schuiten and Peeters, La Frontière Invisible

Information

Summary :

On the occasion of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, where they just won the Grand Prize, a conversation with François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. The two partners had started the Cities of the Fantastic series more than twenty years ago, political fables in a fantasised universe, a mirror of our world.

Context

The artist from Brussels, François Schuiten (1956) is the son of an architect, which certainly predisposed him to create his cult series Les Cités Obscures.

Having published his first pages at 16 years old, he was still a student at the Institute of Comics in Saint-Luc when he met Claude Renard, with whom he would publish his first two albums: Aux Médianes de Cymbiola (1980) and Le Rail (1982). He then collaborated with his brother for the magazine Pilote, before associating himself with the script writer Benoit Peeters to publish in 1983 Les Murailles de Samaris, the first opus in the Les Cités Obscures series, which won him several prizes: prize for best album of the year at the Angoulême Festival for La Fièvre de d'Urbicande (1985), the Plantin-Morétus prize for L'Archiviste (1987), the Charleroi Festival prize for Brüsel (1992). Having collaborated on the graphic conception of two films (Gwendoline by Just Jaeckin and Taxandriaby Raoul Servais), he also designed the metro stations Porte de Hal in Brussels and Arts et Métiers in Paris.

In 2002, he received the grand prize at the Angoulême Festival for his life's work, and is currently working on the film adaptation of Les Cités Obscurs.

Aurélia Caton

Transcription

David Pujadas

And not very far away from this science-fiction universe, we're back with - and it's a comic strip - the grand prize of Angoulême, cartoonist François Schuiten who, along with his partner, scriptwriter Benoît Peters, has just released "La Frontière InvisiA trip in the world of map-making, which falls within the Cities of the Fantastic series which started twenty years ago. Marie-Hélène Bonnot, Jean-François Hoffmann.

Marie-Hélène Bonnot

François Schuiten's world is parallel to ours, a sort of reflection of our society.Schuiten is a craftsman: two years to make "La Frontière Invisible".The story of a young map-maker in an imaginary country, Sodrovna-Voldachie. He discovers an obsolete map-making centre, where you move about in a flying bicycle.For Schuiten, comic strips allow all dreams to exist.

François Schuiten

My father was an architect, but he would have loved for me to become a painter.But I was so happy to tell stories, and the idea of travelling through pictures, and also, no doubt, to escape a bit, to get away from it all.

Marie-Hélène Bonnot

A meticulous cartoonist, when he invents vehicles, he has them made to test their credibility.Like this flying machine from the preceeding volume.He's never alone, he's been working with Benoît Peters, his scriptwriting partner, since 1983.They're already working on volume 2 of "La Frontière Invisible", outling the first page.

Benoît Peeters

And the cartographic traces are erased from the ground.

François Schuiten

And this machine which is a bit bizarre, we can see a detail, perhaps these are the feet?

Marie-Hélène Bonnot

Benoît Peeters

How could we, ourselves, for example, talk about the former Yugoslavia, or talk about the conflict in the Near East?

François Schuiten

How could we talk about it in a rightful manner, when in a metaphoric theme, like the one in La Frontière Invisible, I think we're much more at ease, more rightful, and maybe a bit more universal?

Marie-Hélène Bonnot

Also a report on a society where new technologies replace the know-how of previous generations.

François Schuiten

We see people that have talent, that have qualities, that have a memory, and that are cast aside, that are cleaned out in favour of someone who is indeed very young, who is probably talented.But there isn't any passage, we're very interested in these ruptures.

Marie-Hélène Bonnot

The authors of "La Frontière Invisible" help us to decipher the world that surrounds us. In this regard, it's more than just a comic strip.